"Are You Working On The Right Problem?"
"Are You Working On The Right Problem?"
Productizing the geniuses of the past whilst avoiding the pitfalls of the present
Because I am a troublemaker, I often ask smart people I know if they are “working on the right problem.”
The dumber smart people go on and cite all the social proof that what they were working on is important. They’ll mention how much money they’ve raised from this venture fund or how they were profiled in that newspaper or magazine.
No, I didn’t ask that question, I’ll say gently.
“I asked if you were working on the right problem,” I’ll say back.
There are lots of ways of answering the right people question.
After all if you’re working on the right problem sometimes you’ll be working alone. But that’s precisely where a lot of the progress comes from — thinking and doing alone. You will be called crazy — and you may well be — but if you work on the right problem(s) you can become wealthy and they’ll call you “eccentric.”
You don’t need to be reading business books. You should be reading science fiction and doing real historical research.
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Professor Steve Hsu of Michigan State University notes what he calls the Chinese-American STEM gap. He points out that there are a lot more Chinese STEM graduates being produced than American graduates. He suggests that this gap, which is projected to grow, will have all kinds of interesting geopolitical consequences. Perhaps.
But WWII, in fact, shows us that quantity has a quality all its own isn’t exactly right.
When you’re up against a foe with superior numbers the trick is to trick your opponent into wasting his efforts. Every Nazi scientist working on Wunderwaffe was wasting his time. The Nazis lost. The scientists were divvied up. My understanding is that the Soviets got more of the Nazi scientists than we did but we took the moon. (My view, for what it’s worth, is that the moon landing was real but the footage was fake. My friend Zeist points out that for all the claims of the Soviets, they really did want to build a serious moon mission. They just couldn’t get it done.)
We put real money into it. “In the 1960s, where the US space budget was [nearly] 4.5 per cent of [federal spending]. It’s 0.5 per cent today,” notes British astronaut Tim Peake. With that expenditure we are crushing the Russian war machine in Ukraine.
What were all the Soviet physicists and their pet Nazis doing? Nothing much at all.
The truth is that not many people are doing much of anything.
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Why did the Germans lose the war? The Nazis had more planes, more engineers, and were, I think it’s fair to say, way smarter, and yet they lost all the same. Why?
They were out spied and ultimately out-bullshitted by Anglo-American intelligence.
Eric Frank Russell, author of Wasp, was really writing about his experience in the Special Operations Executive, Churchill’s army which was designed to “set Europe ablaze.” Let’s quote from Wikipedia about Wasp.
The novel begins by introducing James Mowry as he is being recruited by the Terran government to infiltrate enemy lines; to become a "wasp", in the sense portrayed in the opening passages of the novel. His recruitment is somewhat less than voluntary: Mowry is offered the alternative of conscription and assignment to the front. His dossier states that he can be counted on to do anything, provided the alternative is worse. So persuaded, he accepts the assignment.
Notwithstanding the method of persuasion, Mowry is an ideal recruit, having spent the first seventeen years of his life living under the Sirian Empire. After extensive linguistic and cultural training and surgery designed to make him appear to be Sirian, he is sent to the Sirian outpost world of Jaimec to begin his mission. The first phase of his mission involves placing stickers with subversive slogans all over the Jaimecan towns in the hope of beginning to create the first murmurings of confusion and concern in Sirian society.
Completing his first objective, Mowry begins the second: sending letters to various people of importance informing them of several deaths by his hand. These threats are always signed by a mythical rebel organisation named Dirac Angestun Gesept (Sirian Freedom Party) and often emblazoned by the slogan, "War makes wealth for the few, misery for the many. At the right time, Dirac Angestun Gesept will punish the former, bring aid and comfort to the latter."
Following this, Mowry moves on to phase three, the hiring of Sirian civilians as contract killers to kill prominent members of the Kaitempi and other government officials. With the Sirians becoming more concerned about the disruption they believe the D.A.G. is causing, Mowry's success allows him to move on to phase four of his plan.
The fourth phase involves Mowry planting fake wire tapping devices on several buildings (including the Kaitempi headquarters) to engender paranoia. He also continues to spread rumours via Sirian civilians to plant other seeds of doubt among the populace.
With a Terran invasion imminent, Mowry is told to skip to phase nine of his operation: the sabotaging of Jaimecan sea-ships in another effort to divert the Sirians' concern away from the real – and approaching – threat. This time, the Terrans strike and the invasion begins. Mowry is captured by a Terran spaceship and is held for a few days before a government man recognises that he is not Sirian, but Terran. The novel ends with a government man informing Mowry that a wasp on another world has been captured, and that he is the replacement.
Now doesn’t that sound an awful lot like the “active measures” campaign being deployed against us?
You get a similar flavor of that when you watch Operation Mincemeat on Netflix. You might then ask yourself.
Are you being misdirected? How would you know? Are your efforts being exploited by a foreign power? Such questions aren’t as easy to answer as you might think.
I’ve often been of the view that hustle porn is a way of causing people to burn out.
“The great minds of my generation working on ads” This sucks. Sure, but maybe it’s also an op designed to get people to buy things they don’t need from China.
If you’re trying to see if you’re being misdirected look for certain telltale signs.
The cult of the founder is an example. The ego is the E in MICE and people will do crazy things like pose for Forbes Magazine covers for their ego. I think we might consider appearing in Forbes to be probable cause.
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Steve Hsu’s new start up is designed to deal with the problem of hallucination in AI.
What’s the problem of hallucination? It’s the tendency of the machine to bullshit us and miseducate us.
Here’s Steve who suggests that perhaps we ought to use textbooks as our reference point.
But what if a lot of textbooks are fake? And why wouldn’t they be?
The close Chinese ties between Bill Gates should make us think twice before using Common Core or equivalent approaches.
Being perfectly honest: I am against things which are common. I am against flatness. I’m with Robert Frost, that last American poet: “The best things and best people rise out of their separateness; I'm against a homogenized society because I want the cream to rise.”
Striving genius ought to be rewarded through contracts and through setting standards for others to try to meet. I’m told in Japan that if you invest a gizmo or a doodad and that gizmo or doodad is judged to be the best and you keep your edge it becomes the standard. Why not in America too?
We like to believe that anyone and everyone can be educated and maybe they can but only up to a point. The world shows us that its cognitive ability, properly focused, that’s the limiting factor. We need to turn away from weapons of mass distraction and eliminate them when and where we can.
Ultimately, I believe that the only real education is self-education. To be sure you can expose a mind to a lot. And perhaps you should. But exposure always comes at a cost of originality or squashed eccentricity.
Our real founders paved the way. Ben Franklin. Thomas Alva Edison. Henry Ford.
Edison and Ford even cartelized bright minds. So did William Shockley, arguably the founder of Silicon Valley.
The thing you learn when you are an autodidact is that you have to always be learning, always producing new things.
Your value doesn’t come from your position or rank or pedigree but from what you are learning and what you are teaching and what you are giving others.
The best way to teach someone is to give them a product that embeds the teaching. Every well-ordered product is a lesson to a curious mind. A book, a machine, a technique. Yes, the greatest teacher is experience and its handmaiden observation.
Fortunately you can learn a lot from the past thinkers because they put so many things in books. Putting things in books is how they became immortal — albeit imperfectly.
But some books are designed to deliberately misinform you. This is the naughty teacher’s trick who often works with the spy to create a different history, a fake history. This is, in fact, what the plot of Memento by that Anglo-American bard Christopher Nolan is all about.
Can the naughty teacher be tamed? Archival research creates a kind of archaeological hunt, a kind of forensics for the curious. This is why the archives have to be shut down by the enemies of freedom and why they are loathe to write anything down.
You can find old teachers and productize them. Pick a thinker you admire whose insights didn’t have the benefit of our modern Information Age and get to work. We must productize the polymaths.
Now be careful here too. There are a lot of efforts in the present to miseducate you about the past. Try to understand a thinker or writer or engineer as his friend or contemporary might have. There are all kinds of faking of history that takes place. My friend Jordan Bloom notes rightly how much of the Dead Sea scrolls are utterly fake. Let’s not forget that Amanda Milius, whose father John Milius gave us Conan the Barbarian, dated Nadav Eisen whose father was involved in the faking of the Dead Sea scrolls.
Yes, the past is a foreign country but curiosity — real curiosity — is your passport.
For me that figure is Francis Galton. Galton’s contributions are considerable and worth perusing over at my colleague Gavan Tredoux’s website — Galton.org.
Hereditary Genius was published in 1869. Let’s productize that!
Do we dare? We dare.
Yes, we must productize the polymaths. Or be reduced to our baser instincts and locked forever into the endless doom scroll. That, too, is a kind of Dead Sea scroll — only this time the faking is all yourself.